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Much hype surrounds the ROI and overall efficiency that the cloud will offer IT departments and business units. However, despite this buzz, questions remain relating to the cloud and legacy applications. Migrating to the cloud does not have to be difficult and this process can be executed without compromising application performance.

Enterprise application modernization solutions provider Micro Focus' President of North America Ken Powell shares three beginning tips for CIOs and IT workers as they plan to migrate their legacy applications to the cloud.

1. Apps Everywhere: Where to begin?

Today's IT professionals are managing increasingly complex environments containing several different applications running on all sorts of platforms. Before modernizing legacy applications and moving them to the cloud, it is important to prioritize which ones need to be modernized vs. which you would like to be updated.

In order to do this, all applications should be charted by the highest business value and highest cost and compare that to which ones have the highest impact and best business cases. The applications that are of the utmost importance in terms of value and impact, but also carry a high cost are the ones that should migrate to the cloud first. As this charting commences, it is important to remember that the IT department should work with the business to ensure that the technology and app roadmap are on par with the business and product plans.

2. Leverage application portfolio management tools

Technically a legacy application is one that could have been written as recently as yesterday, such as a PowerPoint application. It would be considered legacy because it's being built off of something else. It is important to use application portfolio management tools when modernizing legacy apps for the cloud so that those most crucial to the business can be easily identified.

3. Bygone applications are not gone

Contrary to popular belief, 20-year-old business IT applications written in older languages such as COBOL are in fact suited to run in the cloud. In the past, these applications supported around 1,000 users and were as powerful as today's smart phones in terms of processing power and memory.

The critical success factor for these apps was making sure that they and their frameworks can easily support multi-tenant and multi-user capabilities. That same notion of supporting large amounts of users on less powerful platforms translates to the cloud. The key is to get the platform to support all of those same APIs so applications can move seamlessly into the cloud.

Ken Powell serves as President of North America for enterprise application modernization solutions provider Micro Focus.

This story, "Choosing Legacy Apps for the Cloud: 3 Starting Tips" was originally published by
CIO.